Guidance, the help page and a dummy blog

You all know it has snowed on my house for more than an entire day.  I could have taken a very cold winter wonderland walk, like Elaine.  I could have been laid up, like Delores (ouch, and get better soon!).  Actually, I did something equally as challenging and painful.  I spent the day coming to grips with my blog.  

Kay explained to me a week or so ago how to follow a blog that doesn’t have a place to “join”.  Right up at the top of bog pages is a line I never saw: Follow Share Report Abuse Next Blog.  I was only after the Follow function, but confess I stayed up late one night, hooked on the Next Blog function.

Lisleman and Ms. Sparrow both wondered how I came by Cup on the Bus.  Not a mystery to me, but obviously time to clean up my act.  Lisleman mentioned I could make and use additional pages.  A long time ago Delores explained how I could add a Blogs I Follow list, but I couldn’t figure it out and abandonded the attempt, frustrated.

When I announced earlier today I would do housekeeping,  Delores told me to be careful, and that struck me as so sensible,  I set up a dummy blog to practice on.  I named by new blog See how to do it, and learned how to make additional pages, how to get the blogs I follow gadget in the right place, how to list the blogs I read, how to label my blogs!  Google should give me a certificate for passing remedial blogging.

So, I have a tab where curious folks can see how I named my blog.  I have labeled all my blogs so curiouser folks can click on something interesting and see all the blogs about that. And, one day Ellen commented she liked a story, but wished for a program to follow the characters.  So, I will use my new skills to make a third extra page titled Cast of Characters.  Or maybe just Characters.

Posting in haste; Jan just announced supper:  Burning Love.  I’m grateful to all of you for everything.

You can't be talking to me!

Yesterday I thought the cold is more acceptable when it’s accompanied by a good snowfall. It snowed all day and was lovely.  It also snowed all night, and continues as I glance at the window.  We’ve had our four to six, it’s time to stop.  Are you listening, Lake Huron and Lake Erie.  We don’t get lake effect snow in February during real winters when the lake is frozen over.  Living on the watershed between Lake Erie and the Ohio River means snow in any event; storms hit the ridge, stop and dump their load.   But it’s been a very mild winter.  No Alberta clippers, no panhandle hooks.  One lake effect event in mid February with forty degree temperatures by Wednesday---I shouldn't be grumbling. 

Today I am going to attempt some blog housekeeping.  I may succeed, or I may disappear.  Check back tomorrow.

Snow in NE Ohio

Last year we broke snowfall records, this year I’m looking at the second reasonable snowfall of the season. One four incher in January sent the snowplows out and they seem to have been down today, as it’s been snowing since last night to give us the two inches we have. 

Fat boy has a snug coat.  Everything Tom owns has a name.  He tills the garden with Big Red and mows with Big Yeller. I think he snow blows with another Big Red.  They aren’t twins, though.  He sends the grandkids around to pick up all the sticks and branches that fall, after which they can build a fire in Fat Boy and roast marshmallows. 

That upturned stone is a barn footer with a heart carved into it.  I bought it at a show, from a teenager with autism.  He had a corner of his mother’s booth at a spring herb show.  He had much larger stones with complex designs, some large enough to be watering troughs. This little heart was the least expensive among the small stones, the design was the most simple.  I paid seventy dollars for it in the 1980’s and he carried it to the car.  I would have preferred the clover or the fleur de leis, but could only afford the heart.  The animals don’t know that, and it’s the outdoor water bowl for the cat and dog all summer.  We tip it up in the winter so it doesn’t accumulate water, freeze and crack.

Toby watching me take pictures.

With a purloined pen.  He may want to appropriate the computer and write his own blog.   Does he really think I'm just a big cat?

Cat whiskers

I’ve always collected cat whiskers.  I kept them somewhere, but they generally weren’t there when I thought about them or went to add a new whisker.  No matter, I’d start a new repository.  My most recent collection has three whiskers, although one is too fine to show up.

The new kitten, Toby, has over the legal limit of whiskers, in length, if not in number.  He lost a baby tooth, we found it and I stashed it with the collection of cat whiskers prior to the current collection.  If all my collections ever come together, it will be magnificent.

When we went to lunch at Beth’s last week I took my camera.  She and Shelly have been given charge of the family mementos they dusted as children, but I thought pictures of some might be fun for a blog.  Here are Beth’s baby shoes her other grandma had bronzed.  Do we still do that?

Here is my Grandpa Rolf’s silver baby cup.   Grandma Rolf  kept it polished!  I didn’t.  I never owned silver polish.  I used tooth paste to clean my silver rings.

But look what is in the silver cup.  My son-in-law, Bill, has a fine collection of cat whiskers.  I wonder if the bird feather keeps them from disappearing.

Cats don't think they are people.  They think we are cats.

A family meeting

Polio was the scourge of childhood when I grew up, and all the years before me, I’m sure.  I have a memory of absolute terror as a child, seeing a child in an iron lung on the television set at my aunt and uncle’s home. I ran to another room and didn’t return.  So that was polio.

We knew about polio.  Two brothers in our neighborhood had survived.  One wore a leg brace for his paralyzed leg.  A girl I went through every grade with wore a leg brace that extended over her hips.  No question, we were familiar with polio. 

It also was a topic of conversation among our parents.  Every mother had a theory on polio’s cause and prevention.  In our neighborhood the cause was attributed to the heat of the noonday sun.  Children were called in for lunch at noon and kept indoors until 2:00 pm, sharp.  A lot of naps were foisted off in those two hours.  “You can’t go out, you may just as well take a nap.”  Since parents were not to be argued with in that decade, it worked fairly well.  I remember being three or four and getting up repeatedly to ask my dad if I could get up yet.  He called several times to wake me when the nap was deemed over.

We grew older, the nap business actually did become unenforceable.  But, there were soap operas and baseball on the radio to while away the two hours.  Our Gal Sunday.  I Remember Mama. Our mother decided teaching something to these captive children would be a good thing, and I remember a couple of summers with the living room packed with neighborhood boys and my brothers learning red work embroidery and cross stitch.  I was the only girl in our neighborhood until I was ten and my sister was born.  Walt still makes lovely crochet work.

When Walt was eight years old, 1953, my parents had a family meeting.  His school class had been asked for volunteers to test a polio vaccine, the Salk vaccine.  Walt had asked to volunteer, my parents gave their permission.  But, they wanted his siblings to understand the gravity and possible consequences of Walt’s decision.  My head was a jumble of all their words about bravery, possible consequences, science, knowledge, good.  That iron lung crowded out all the words.  I was frightened for him and impressed by his bravery.

So, my brother Walt was a test subject for Salk vaccine.  A year or so later the vaccine was approved and we all received the shot, including Walt, because the test may or may not have been a placebo.  The cases of polio declined dramatically over the rest of the decade; today it’s essentially eradicated in the country and on most of the globe.  Children just ten years younger, like my sister, never knew their parents’ fear of the disease.  But she still had to come in and take that two hour nap.

Eight year old vaccine volunteer